Good guys win: International Criminal Sentenced to 13 Years For Identity Theft Scheme

The news is so full of the security failures and problems that it is worthwhile to pause and see the good. Ngo built a marketplace and sold identifying information about regular people – in packages that contained everything for an identity theft. He was caught and a number of his ‘customers’ in the U.S. were captured.

Details and full links below – if you were breached, consider the breach response task list from How Not To Be Hacked.

Ngo, 25, will serve 13 years in prison for hacking into U.S. business computers and stealing the information of approximately 200 million US citizens to sell to other people as so-called ‘fullz’, Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Donald Feith of the District of New Hampshire and Director Joseph P. Clancy of the U.S. Secret Service announced.

The IRS confirmed 13,673 U.S. citizens had their information sold on Ngo’s websites, with $65 million in fraudulent individual income tax returns filed thanks to his services.